Putting the Fun in Fundraising

It’s been five months since I joined ToMarket and next week will be my last working with them full-time. It’s been a tough year or so for startups and we were not immune to the macroeconomic landscape and headwinds.

It’s hard to raise money in the best of times, but was even harder recently. Gergely Orosz at The Pragmatic Engineer agrees. He shares his analysis and this summed it up for me:

In the US and Europe, the venture capital market has reverted to 2020 levels or earlier … While less startup funding – and fewer job openings! – are not great news, reverting to pre-pandemic levels honestly seems like something which was always going to happen eventually.

We haven’t (yet) raised as much money as we hoped to. So we made the tough decision to downsize the product development team, myself included.

The folks remaining will be scrappy and successful in many ways. We laid a lot of groundwork in the product and our systems will allow them to keep onboarding and supporting customers. The lights will stay on and I will continue to advise and support ToMarket.

What’s next? Once I finish wrapping up as best I can I’ll begin thinking and share more. Until then, please wish us well and let me know if you’d like to catch up.